3 Nude Models

April 9, 3016. 5 mins pencil sketch. 45″ x 55″

Saturday was supposed to be a family day which I should stay home with family or rest. But today everyone was engaged therefore I had an extra chance to my favourite painting practise.

Today I chose to go to a new painting group at JCCAC. JCCAC was formerly a 50’s century Hong Kong old factory complex. At that period of Hong Kong, the livelihood of most residents was light industries such as toys, garments, plastic which did not require much skills but intensive in labour. That was part of our history how our ancestors, mainly homeless and unskilled illegal immigrants from Mainland China struggle for their survival in a new home lack of natural resources, and who successful turned this new home into one of the most important and prosperous economic cities in the world for the many generations to come. It was in these old buildings you could imagine the miracles and felt grateful to every nameless ordinary persons who had contributed their lifetime several decades ago, to make our life today safe and stable, comfortable and well off.

Our government, both the colonial and Special Administrative Region had not put a lot of effort preserving theses valuable heritage. Historical buildings, written or oral history, books, photos, arts, relics, video footage were not well protected and well preserved. Similarly, some localised arts and cultural activities, some primitive industries were not able to exist without any assistance from institutions or government when facing competition from modern conglomerates.

JCCAC was the only few heritage which can lucky be preserved for our next generations. Therefore despite it is inconvenient, I choose to go there whenever I have a chance.

This studio in JCCAC was operated by a British call John MC Arthur. I have heard that this was one of the oldest established studio for nude model life painting. I were new to this circle therefore I did not any chance to experience it before.

John himself was an artist who loved to paint human body in free style.

And because he was a gwelio, the participants were mostly gwelio of different nationalities. Models alike. Therefore to myself, a Chineses, whom had been widely exposed to a lot of mainland China artists in my early 3 years, the experience was very fresh.

This first experience turned out to be a real delight surprise. I had drawn gwelio before, but this time, it was a double male model set up. One of the models was Philippe, a French artist with extraordinary slim and long limbs and Sei, a Japanese mixed who had a face like the ancient oriental warrior.

Both of them had big bead and long hair tied up. They interacted with each other to pose a lot of unbelievable angles for us. Philippe was a yoga master and his pose was fantastic.

And the most fascinating part was later on a young Aussie girl offered to be our volunteer nude model to make the modelling become a triplet.

I had never draw more than 1 person at one time and it was so excited for me. This challenge was immense. The host John told me that this was his first time to have 3. I just felt that I was always so lucky.

I had been trained for 9 months to draw long pose like 2 to 4 hours each pose. But the people here were more into short causal sketching. That would mean slow motion, 1 min, 2 min, 5 min, 10 min poses. For 3 people it was really challenging.

I hadn’t drawn well today. But I didn’t care. I am happy.